Museums and galleries are the places most associated with partaking in art. On an increasing scale, that has moved into the public, with murals and the like.
For Black American art, that action historically has taken place in locations such as churches, community centers, and at historically Black colleges and universities.
A 2022 New York Times article highlights HBCUs “as keepers of tangible materials of culture and as training grounds for generations of artists and art historians, curators and conservationists.”
University of Memphis art history professor and curator Dr. Earnestine Jenkins extensively details the art impact of one such HBCU — LeMoyne College. It housed a federally created Community Art Center in Memphis, in the 1930s and ‘40s. According to her research, it was one of nine such centers specifically for Black people. (Click here for an OAM podcast interview with Jenkins on the topic.) The centers provided free access to exhibitions, lectures, and art training.
Jenkins writes, “By 1941, LeMoyne was the single institution of higher learning in Memphis and the Mid-South where African Americans could receive academic exposure and professional training in the fine arts.”
Famed Harlem Hospital muralist Vertis Hayes ran the LeMoyne Federal Art Center, which later became the college’s art department. Jenkins credits this art department with the development of art programs at Black Memphis high schools such as Hamilton and Manassas, which produced notable artists like James Little.
Spelman College Museum of Fine Art Director Dr. Liz Andrews and art patron Bernard Lumpkin spoke about the role of HBCUs as Black art repositories in an October 2023 lecture at Rhodes College in Memphis.
Andrews co-curated the “Black American Portraits” exhibition that originated at Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The art collection of Lumpkin and his partner Carmine Boccuzzi comprises works in the traveling “Young, Gifted, and Black” exhibition.
“Black American Portraits,” Andrews said, was inspired by a David Driskell-curated exhibition 45 years prior at LACMA that borrowed “a whole lot of works” from HBCUs.
Driskell, also an artist, at that time served as chairman of the art department of Fisk University — a Nashville HBCU.
“... I think right now a lot of mainstream museums are making up for lost time and lost opportunity when it comes to collecting Black artists,” Andrews said during the Rhodes lecture. “But places like Spelman and Tuskegee (University) and Fisk have had art collections forever. And helped Black artists who were systematically kept out of museums, help them establish institutional legitimacy.”
Andrews' first show at Spelman opened in Spring 2020 and centered on Spelman’s art collection. It featured 40 works from artists including Henry Ossawa Tanner, Romare Bearden, Carrie Mae Weems, and Lorna Simpson, among others.
The exhibition, “Silver Linings,” began traveling in fall 2023. Andrews says this is the first time the works have traveled as a “cohesive collection.”
The first college on the tour was Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Vassar is part of the Seven Sisters, a group of seven liberal arts-based, historically women’s colleges in the Northeast.
“To say that Vassar College — which was founded to be a place for white women exclusively at its genesis — now recognizes Spelman College as its peer institution, is a very powerful thing,” Andrews said in October.
A recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution article notes that Spelman and Clark Atlanta University museums jointly house more than 1,600 works from influential Black artists.
And the public can view these for free.
The Atlanta University Center Art History and Curatorial Studies Collective launched six years ago, providing Spelman, Clark and Morehouse College students the opportunity to major in art history or minor in art history or curatorial studies. A symposium this weekend examined the impact of the collective’s first five years.
The keynote address focused on the major (and corrective) “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” exhibition and how it borrows heavily from HBCU collections. Those collections include Clark, Fisk, Hampton University Art Museum, and Howard University Gallery of Art.
The exhibition, which opened February 25, is on view through July 28 at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. (It includes a five-part accompanying podcast series, “Harlem Is Everywhere.”)